Collaboration, relationships and fleeting opportunities: growing the future early childhood music education workforce

The aim of, Jane’s, Soundwaves Early Childhood Music lead, and Karen’s, Early Childhood Studies lecturer, inquiry is to encourage new insights into how multiple relationalities and learning play out, throughout Soundwaves, an early childhood music education (ECME) programme. We work with Barad’s diffractive methodology to shape our auto-ethnography. With pens, sparkly bits, ribbons, glue and paper, we map the Soundwaves narrative. Caring ethics, for the human and more-than-human, runs throughout our research practices. (Re)turning, the data, posthuman and critical new materialist theory, the Soundwaves narrative is (re)told. Concerns the neo-liberal narrative had played us, were replaced, when noticing the gap between our organisations offered reassuring insights. In this gap, resisting the neo-liberal narrative, is ‘fleetingness’, which welcomes experimentation and play to learning opportunities and our collaboration. These insights are useful to those who wish to maintain the visibility of ECME and resist creating instrumentalised learning experiences, whilst growing the ECME workforce.